BITS; The End Nears
For Google Reader

By NICK BILTON

Published: March 18, 2013

4:43 p.m. | Updated to provide Google comment on why it shut down the service.

Last night, I went to meet a group of friends for dinner in San Francisco after work. As I sat down at the table, two of my dining companions asked in unison, with eye-opening looks on their faces, “Did you hear the news?”

“Yes,” I replied as I shuffled my chair in and unfurled my napkin. “They picked a new pope, from Latin America.”

“No, not that,” they responded. “Google is shutting down Google Reader on July 1.” The dinner then turned into a torrent of information about the chaos that had ensued online as a result.

My friends are not the only ones upset by Google’s decision to eliminate Google Reader, the company’s service for viewing blogs through an RSS feed.

Outraged Google Reader fans put together a petition on the Web site Change.org to keep the RSS reader alive, and in a few hours had garnered more than 50,000 signatures.

“It’s still a core part of my Internet use,” wrote Dan Lewis, an avid Google Reader fan, in the petition. “And of the many, many others who are signed below. Our confidence in Google’s other products — Gmail, YouTube, and yes, even Plus — requires that we trust you in respecting how and why we use your other products.”

Some people defended the decision. Dave Winer, one of the people behind the invention of RSS, said good riddance in a blog post on his Web site. But Mr. Winer was an exception as he noted later in the day that his blog post attracted “some pretty sick comments” that he was forced to delete.

In a blog post on the company’s Web site, Google said it was shutting down the RSS reader because “usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products.” The service has been the leading RSS reader for some time, and users seem to be upset that there are few RSS competitors, although there are newer types of news-aggregating products like Flipboard and Pulse. One theory is that Google is trying to push customers to Google Plus, its social-networking site, where users can track product pages for different news outlets.

Now people will be out on the news reader street by July 1, and there are few places for them to go.

As BuzzFeed noted, using data from the BuzzFeed Network, a group of sites that collectively have over 300 million users, Google Reader still sends a considerable amount of traffic to these sites. Google Plus, the company’s social network, does not.

Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this post incorrectly said that Google declined to comment on why it shut down the service.

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.